Return of the Anti-Valentine&#8217;s Day Playlist

With twice as much gory lyrics and depression as last year!

It’s that time of year again. Heart shapes decorate every window while our sympathetic friends point out that we will surely have a date next year. You can’t even turn the radio on without some DJ advising you it isn’t too late to order flowers, teddy bears, or chocolate-covered everythings!

For some, this holiday is a romantic occasion in which they and a special someone exchange sweet little mementos of their love. To others, Valentine’s Day is an annoying, depressing drag that makes you want to stay in bed with the covers pulled up over your head for the next 24 hours. Yes, single people loathe Valentine’s Day, but at least we can funnel that hatred into creating awesomely twisted mixtapes.

The following songs celebrate Anti-Valentine’s Day in many ways, featuring songs that are darkly depressing despite their romantic title, ballads about loneliness, morbid songs featuring the deaths of terrible ex-lovers, and even tunes designed to make you feel better about being single. From genres ranging from classic rock to pop, and even a little bit of country, there’s a little something for everybody who will be celebrating Anti-Valentine’s Day this year. And by all means, if you can think of a song to add to the list, comment below!

Elvis Presley - “Heartbreak Hotel”

We might as well start with the granddaddy of depressing blues/rock songs about loneliness. True story: songwriter Tommy Durden was inspired to write this after a newspaper quoted “I walk a lonely street” from a local man’s suicide note.

INXS - “Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down The Mountain)”

Some believe this song is about mountain climbing, but it is also possible to see it as a metaphor for romance gone wrong. How many people feel like they just tumbled off a cliff and got a face full of dirt after being dumped, for instance?

Drake Bell - “Somehow”

There are many songs in which a wronged woman takes revenge on the jerk husband who let her down, but how many were written and performed by a Nickelodeon star? Teen idol Drake Bell brought us this morbid yet tuneful ballad about a battered wife who kills her husband, smokes a cigarette, and then throws his body into the lake at night. Not surprisingly, he never performed it on the TV-Y rated TV show he co-starred in, but he would later go on to release an album that loosely qualifies as a concept album about a cheating couple.

Sam Cooke - “Another Saturday Night”

V-Day doesn’t fall on a Saturday this year, but loving couples will be out in full force this week, so be warned. Let’s nominate this as the unofficial theme song for the dating scene.

Nazareth - “Love Hurts”

For the next couple of minutes, you can throw yourself a 1970’s-era pity party. Various movies and TV shows often use this song to express heartbreak in a comedic way, but this can be as serious (or as silly) as you would like it to be.

Jaron and the Long Road to Love - “Pray for You”

Don’t sing this one in church. This country hit finds a man praying up some creative revenge scenarios for the woman who wronged him. These also work as good insults for people, as in “I pray a flower pot falls from a window sill and knocks you in the head like I’d like to”.

Train - “50 Ways to Say Goodbye”

Also from the same category of songs that creatively describe horrible things, is a ditty in which revenge death fantasies double as excuses the singer gives for why his girlfriend isn’t with him. You have to give him credit for saying she “got run over by a crappy purple Scion”. As if there is any other type of Scion.

The Eagles - “Heartache Tonight”

If you can’t be consoled by songs that describe how you feel or if you can’t take any morbid pleasure in the darkly depressing stuff, then you can always rock your blues away. There’s this hand-clapping original version, or you can seek out Michael Buble’s cover for a sophisticated type of big band cool.

The Beatles - “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band/ With a Little Help From My Friends”

You might argue that this song doesn’t belong on an Anti-Valentine’s Day playlist. Have you ever really thought about all the lyrics, though? They ARE a “lonely hearts club” and the announcer does want to take the whole audience home with him. Not to mention, the second half: in which Billy Shears needs and wants somebody to love.

The Cars - “Bye Bye Love”

Sure, the lyrics are vaguely romantic and the song does describe someone letting his unrequited love go, but the words are the last thing anybody notices about a Cars song. Just turn it up and rock out, 1980’s New Wave style.

Depending upon your gender, here are two ways to celebrate being single. If it’s Valentine’s Day and you don’t have a date, who cares? You “don’t need no one”, you’re a “One Man Show”, or perhaps as an “Independent Woman”, you’re going to spend your day buying stuff and doing Charlie’s Angels impressions.

The Clovers - “Love Potion #9”

If you can’t be in love: make fun out of it. In our final selection, one unlucky man visits a gypsy who slips him a mickey. Too bad there wasn’t a female cop on 34th and Vine. Another useless fact: the original version had the final line, “I wonder what happens with Love Potion #10”.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.